Pedagogy of the Self: Wittgenstein and Education

The study of education and consequently its application as a means for social change owes more than we might think to the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. His work makes no direct attributions to pedagogy yet traverses many of the same fundamental questions of language, philosophy, and behaviour. Wittgenstein’s philosophy seeks to elucidate the ways philosophers make discursive sense, and quite often their insistence on nonsense. The purpose of his work is to highlight the method by which we can make this understanding explicit through language, a method which is inherently dialogic and therefore educational.

The later work of Wittgenstein which he laid out in various notes and papers, eventually becoming The Philosophical Investigations (1953) is in many ways entirely opposed to that of his earlier magnum opus Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). Such an about turn has left many admirers and scholars of Wittgenstein’s work either confused or patently tribal as to which constitutes his true thought process. Here I will seek to cover both in relation to any pedagogical lessons we can learn from his work.

Wittgenstein is a rationalist, albeit a rather difficult one to place. As a philosopher he sought to link the opposed fields of analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. He was specifically concerned with logical positivism in his early work the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, suggesting that the solution to philosophical problems lay in our ability to use precise statements for which there could be evidence, also referred to as synthetic propositions (1921). The only correct philosophical method to Wittgenstein at this time would be to say nothing except that which can be said with meaning. To communicate in a way devoid of meaning is not to communicate at all.

It was during this time that Wittgenstein proposed his concept of language games. This essentially expresses the idea that all meaning must be constructed on the basis of context. Words have meaning due to the fact they are used in a variety of ways, they have a multiplicity meaning, and they do not require clear definition. These ideas owed a lot to Gottlob Frege’s work On Sense and Reference (1892) which questioned whether words can have any definite meaning outside of the context of a sentence. For Wittgenstein the self forms within these linguistic and cultural practices as a construction of discourse.

These observations provide a potential critique of the traditional view of liberal education, a view which is concerned with the development of the mind and the autonomous person (Peters & Marshall, 1999). Notions which place the self and the subject as the fundamental concerns of education become tenuous when we understand the self and discourse as non-separate entities. We should seek to correctly identify philosophical problems through our teaching, thereby transmitting good habits which prevent us from holding mistaken beliefs. In short the idea of the teacher and their teachings is a false distinction; there is only that which is said in that place at that time and the meaning we assign to it.

Conversely in The Philosophical Investigations towards the end of his life Wittgenstein espoused the idea that language acquires meaning from the way in which it is used. Language occurs as part of an activity or a ‘form of life’ (1953) not an objective point of reference. This stems from Wittgenstein’s later focus on language as a product of rule following and representation. This should not be mistaken as a focus on how we acquire those rules and representations however; see Chomsky (1957) and Fodor (1975) for a cognitive explanation of how this comes to pass. The way in which the individual establishes their relation to these rules and recognises how and why they should be put into practice is what is important for the educator, not as was suggested in his previous writings, the context within which the language seems to exist.

Here Wittgenstein is proposing that rather than seek truth (in life, in education, or even at all) we seek new ways of thinking; that we should think for ourselves. Classically a child is ‘trainable’ in a socially structured environment in which the ability or competence to be taught is already mastered by the teacher (Williams, 1994). The goal of teaching therefore is to enable learners to ‘see’ rather than interpret (Budd, 1987). Wittgenstein chooses to emphasise the postmodern respect for difference instead and therefore does not see the self as essentially dialogical as the likes of Habermas and Heidegger do, it is more representative to say that he sees the self as pedagogical. To presuppose that our language or objects have any essential order or shape is wrong to Wittgenstein, they only have use, and this is true of how we educate also.

Wittgenstein’s later philosophy in regards to education can be read as this therefore: we do not share the otherness of those being taught, nor can we observe whether they understand our explanations (Maruyama, 2006). We assume, quite wrongly, that the dialogic form is controlled solely by the questioner in the classic Socratic sense. However, the rules by which language is employed may well coincide perfectly with how it is used, yet this does not mean to say they are descriptive of its actual use (Kuusela, 2008). As such we can never be certain of what is being understood and can only strive forward in a confused form of mutual edification.

Combining these divergent thought processes is difficult and perhaps impossible but that does not mean to say they are incomprehensible. Wittgenstein’s work is confusing and at times contradictory yet it remains unique in its breadth and precision in regards to how language can be used as a tool for philosophical excavation, and for that matter there remains a great deal of interest to the educator as well.